Even the "there's a great album hiding in here!" cliché doesn't really apply, since if you conducted ten trials of picking fourteen songs at random, you'd end up with ten albums of near equal mediocrity.

Falls a few yards short of essential listening.

Hello Love is certainly the most hinged of their three releases, in that it sounds the cleanest—the most streamlined both instrumentally and lyrically. Too bad what it’s saying is, more often than not, familiar to the point of being trite.

Little on Magic outright falters, which is why it's hard at first to explain how unappealing it is.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1416" TARGET="_blank">Ultimately, Closer doesn&#146;t disappoint and represents a legitimate fifth installment in the Plastikman series, in spite of the fact that it breaks little new ground beyond its predecessors.</A> [score=75]; Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1417" TARGET="_blank">Hawtin [is] firmly again in the leagues with the masters of the genre.</A> [score=81]

The problem with this kind of record is not that it&#146;s hard to find fault with, but that it&#146;s hard to get excited about.

In essence, the group has adopted the smartest possible approach on Tour de France Soundtracks by simply making quintessential Kraftwerk music of a kind stylistically consistent with the music of its past but with subtle enhancements that suggest a connection to the present.

Underneath the big production, Steele writes some great melodies, and that’s the real reason that his sometimes dubious experimentations pay off.

It’s hard to fault an album for being too much of a good thing, but there it is. Songs like “Goliath”, “Glass Walls” and “Linus” just blend together. By the end you no longer look forward to another swooping, disheartened melody, you want variety of any kind.

As always, McGraw’s music primarily falters when the songs themselves lack sufficient emotional content for even his considerable conjuring powers to salvage.... Luckily, there are still moments when songwriting prowess and vocal mastery meet halfway.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

Outwardly, We Are the Pipettes is fun, sweet, and attractive. If you hang around, it starts to feel brittle, frigid, bitchy, and weird.

Relentlessly benign.

It suffers from a lack of identity.

The variety and talent this album offers is enough to recommend it to almost any rap fan.

Witch manage to do a lot more in forty minutes with little more than a bunch of badass riffs and a decent rhythm section than most metal bands these days can do with seventy minutes.

All in all, The Needle Was Travelling is probably the most “human” post-rock record to come out of Berlin.

The Else is their best whole album since, because it’s also the most melodic.

Hyper-concept pseudo-narratives aside, Devin Dazzle is, in a word, shocking, where shocking = rocking and rocking = danceable and danceable = nuts and nuts = 80s kitsch-sex-funk-house-new-wave-punk-disco.

Lots of handclaps, woo woo backing vocals, and laughs amid funny observations about contemporary urban hipster life reveal an assured and charming debut.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms.... Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer.

Some of the sonic twists and turns that Delays pull on You See Colours--the multi-tracked vocals, the airy guitars, the pulsing synths--are jaw-dropping.

If the album has a fault, its that LFO can occasionally be accused of complacency, and a handful of tracks here stray into bog-standard Warp generictronica, but it&#146;s a minor gripe considering the joys on offer elsewhere.

Saint Etienne have regained their touch.

The saddest part of all this useless audio-masturbation is that it completely masks the genuinely beautiful pop songs of which Anderson is so capable.

Though lacking in innovation, the final GBV album will please any longtime fan that prefers &#147;Game of Pricks&#148; to &#147;Chicken Blows&#148;. Pollard&#146;s songwriting finally feels consistent, fully realized and commanding.

On the older albums, the Rosebuds’ synthesizers could sound like reinforcements parachuted in to cover for inadequate guitars or weak songs, but no longer. The front-and-center synths of Night of the Furies sound like a band hitting its stride.

Overall, it’s a story of too many ideas.